Sometimes being an entrepreneur means just seeing the writing on the wall. Amazingly, there are still Intellectual Property dogmatists out there who think it’s fine that the FBI runs around arresting the band’s own fans for making copies of digital files, but U2 has apparently figured out that ship sailed long ago, and is giving away the band’s latest album.

“The United States has problems with unemployment and has problems with poverty and a record number of people meeting the standard of extreme poverty,” said Mark Thornton, senior fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama and a research fellow with the Independent Institute in California. “Extreme poverty in the United States is now over 4 percent, that means they have less than $2 cash per person, per day,” Thornton said in a phone interview on